The First Great Awakening lasted from the 1730s to the 1770s, and during that time evangelizing ministers preached a passionate fire-and-brimstone religion that led to the growth of all denominations, particularly the Baptists and Methodists. Around 1790, the Second Great Awakening began and forever changed the country’s religious landscape.
Revivals, camp meetings, and circuit-riding preachers attracted church members in unprecedented numbers, especially in the South and West. It was also during this period that a pious farmer named William Miller calculated that Jesus would return to Earth around 1843. His prediction led to the most popular and sustained expectation of Judgment Day in American history, with stories, mostly untrue, told about Millerites dressed in “ascension robes” gathering on roofs, hilltops, and cemeteries, singing hymns, and waiting to rise into the sky.
When nothing happened, Miller revised his calculations and when these proved wrong, he stopped making predictions. Another preacher named Snow, however, claimed that the world would end on October 22, 1844; when it did not, the day became known as “the Great Disappointment.” While most Millerites went on to join conventional churches or start new ones, millennial expectations were not confined to whites. The northern Paiute prophet, Wovoka, taught that the Ghost Dance ritual would reunite the Indians with their ancestors, while a “Messiah craze” swept black residents of Georgia in 1889, with no less than five Christs proclaiming that the Judgment was near, and causing a labor shortage.1 America, however, has a long history of sects and cults.
Some, like the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, became part of the religious mainstream, but most were obscure or short-lived.
In Vermont, the Dorrilites were sexually promiscuous vegetarians who wore wooden shoes and sang songs “that would defile a brothel.”2 By 1800, their leader, William Dorril, was claiming to be invulnerable and while preaching that “No arm can hurt my flesh,” a man stood up, punched Dorril in the face, and kept punching him until he admitted that it hurt; they disbanded soon after. Eighty years later, the spirit of Jesus entered red-haired George Jacob Schweinfurth and he set up a “heaven” at Rockford, Illinois, where several female disciples “conceived by the Holy Ghost” and had redheaded babies (Schweinfurth later joined Christian Science and became a life insurance salesman).3 The alchemist and messiah Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed taught a “cellular cosmogony” in which the universe is a bubble of space within an infinite expanse of stone; Earth’s surface is on the interior wall of the bubble, which surrounds and encloses the sun and sky. His followers (“Koreshans”) carried out elaborate experiments to prove that the world is concave and built a utopian community called New Jerusalem at what is now Estero, Florida (when Teed died and failed to resurrect, his followers put him in a tomb that was swept away by a hurricane). While the Koreshans were merely eccentric, zealotry made groups like the Cobbites dangerous.
Preacher Cobb’s first name is forgotten, but he arrived at White County, Arkansas, in 1876. One source claims he practiced “infant sacrifice,” and while that is unlikely, the Cobbites did hold possessions in common, reportedly believed the sun rose and set at Cobb’s command,4 and demonstrated their faith by walking along roof ridges with their eyes closed. This might have gone on indefinitely, and produced nothing worse than an occasional broken neck, had local developments not put the group under pressure.
They were not popular in the neighborhood. Agitating against saloons made the Cobbites enemies, and Preacher Cobb interpreted the arrival of a drought as punishment for man’s sins and a warning that the world might be coming to an end. With that, his followers at Gum Springs, Arkansas, destroyed their property and began dragging passersby inside to hear the gospel, whether they wanted to or not. Two men from the town of Searcy came to see what was happening and one of them, a bartender, apparently planned to amuse himself at the believers’ expense.
When the pair arrived, the bartender reportedly made a sarcastic remark that infuriated the already overwrought Cobbites, who dragged him to an exposed tree root normally used as a chopping block and cut off his head with a dull axe. The gory trophy was kicked like a ball and a “ritual dance” performed around it, before being impaled on “a front yard picket for all to see.”5 The victim’s companion escaped back to Searcy and returned with armed vigilantes.
Believing that faith made them invulnerable to weapons in the hands of the wicked, the Cobbites were defiant. Two were shot dead, most of the others ran away, and those who were captured were put on trial and released. Preacher Cobb reportedly fled into the woods or was escorted from the area by a posse, and nothing more is heard of him. (There is a postscript to the story; according to Heber Taylor of the White County Historical Society, the house where the murder took place “was used as a community amusement center for a while after the Cobbites left. That arrangement didn’t seem to work too well. Some folks said the forms of the men killed there appeared and joined in the dances to the wail of the fiddle.”)6
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Though the bartender’s death was gruesome, it happened far from the media and received little attention outside the state. In the Connecticut murder, “[a] bloody tragedy of this sort, enacted under the very eaves, as it were, of Yale College, in the intelligent, enlightened and pious city of New Haven, must strike every one who hears it with a sudden and creeping horror.”7 And there were newspapers at New Haven and New York City to make sure everyone heard about it.
What happened on the day before Christmas 1855 was the culmination of a long struggle between a woman named Rhoda Wakeman and the Antichrist. She was God’s Messenger, whose divine mission left three dead and made Wakemanite synonymous with religious fanaticism for decades.
Married to Sin
Prophesying is a difficult trade. Jonah was swallowed, then vomited up, by a fish; Tiresias’s gender was changed twice; and no one believed Cassandra. St. Stephen asked, “Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted?” before he was stoned to death,8 and the children of Bethel mocked Elisha’s baldness, saying “Go up, thou baldhead, go up thou baldhead!” God sent “two she-bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them,” but God did not send “she-bears” often enough to deter most critics, and Rhoda Wakeman’s career, like those of her predecessors, was punctuated by difficulties.9
She was born Rhoda Sly on November 6, 1786, in Fairfield, Connecticut, the first of four children fathered by Phineas Sly and his unnamed wife. Sly later married Eunice Baker, who was fifty-three years old when she gave birth to Rhoda’s half brother Samuel in 1803. At age four Samuel, called “Sammy,” suffered a serious head injury that damaged his brain and left him weak-minded.
Around 1800, Rhoda married a distiller named Ira Wakeman (b. 1777) at Fairfield; they had fifteen to seventeen children, of which she acknowledged nine (the Wakeman Genealogy (1630–1899) mentions seven).10 Little can be said about Mrs. Wakeman’s spiritual development, though she reportedly attended Methodist meetings and read the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a popular devotional book titled The Saints Everlasting Rest by the Rev. Richard Baxter, a “Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in their Enjoyment of God in Glory.” In 1825, Ira threatened to kill her, and the prospect of meeting God unprepared provoked some kind of crisis in Mrs. Wakeman, who prayed until Jesus appeared.
He showed her the sufferings of the saints and martyrs and said, “Thou art justified forever—peace to thy soul!” This marked the beginning of “seven years of travail,” when she believed Mr. Wakeman might murder her at any time; according to their daughter Selina, her mother’s fears were well founded, for Mr. Wakeman “used to drink a great deal of liquor and frightened her a great deal because she was determined to get religion. I have heard him threaten her life, saying that if she spoke a word or read a word in the Bible he would be the death of her instantly. . . . I have known my father to carry a razor to bed with him threatening to kill her with
it.” His treatment left Rhoda Wakeman “partially deranged.”11 She produced a written account of her experiences and describes how he finally made up his mind to kill her, so “the enchantment of hell would then be broken and the world would be at peace. He told me that the world would never be at peace as long as God let me live.”12
On the day of the murder, Wakeman declared, “Last Saturday night I took my razor and went before the glass to kill myself. I made a league with the devil, more steadfast and strange than ever, if he would clear me. And then I would Kill you first—and by the great Jehovah Christ I will do it—and they may execute me on the gallows.” He lit a small fire, put two chairs in front of it, and told Mrs. Wakeman to prepare for death. She commended her baby to God, prayed, and sat in one chair while her husband sat in the other. He used “dreadful language and cursed God and d____d me to hell. I thought when he stopped swearing he would cut my throat.” Instead of a razor, though, Wakeman “drew a light on me from the fire,” a length of burning wood, which he thrust into her heart, and it was “the last I knew of this world.”13
She found herself surrounded by a thousand little black spirits that were preparing to take her away when a white spirit came down and the imps vanished. The white spirit escorted Mrs. Wakeman thousands of miles away, to a place of bright white clouds, where she had a series of visions:
I went up to Heaven: there was a red light and many white clouds there: Christ came to me when I was in Heaven with his nails in his hands, spoke peace to my soul; because he spoke peace to my soul I raised up, and another spirit came to me and spoke saying, “Make your peace with God.” I then kept on praying; he soon took me to Paradise and told me all about Adam and Eve and all the other spirits; this light then come on me so that I had to look up, and the spirits said I was numbered as one of them; I was taken up to Heaven from this place of light, and then saw Christ and all the Holy Angels; Christ had on the thorns and looked as he was when crucified; then saw God sitting upon his throne in all his glory; about the throne where all the angels in their white robes, and they were all happy spirits there; this spirit then came and took me back to earth, and when I got to earth again I saw my dead body lying on the floor; felt bad because I had come back to this wicked world again: I soon saw my wicked husband, who said, “By God, she’s raised!” soon after I saw two [angels] came and spoke to me kindly and then Christ appeared to me and I fell down before him. And oh! How happy I felt! And how happy I then was!14
The room was also filled with angels six inches tall and her husband repeated three times, “By God, she’s raised!”
According to other sources, Ira Wakeman gave his wife a brutal beating that left her unconscious; nevertheless, she had an experience that she understood as a revelation. Some idea of the beliefs it inspired can be cobbled together from court testimony, newspaper interviews, and personal writings.
The Wakemanite Doctrines
Wakeman’s faith can be summed up in twelve points. Three are unremarkable:
A belief in the genuineness of the Bible.
A belief in a God as a Supreme Ruler.
That Jesus Christ came into the world to save it from sin.
The rest are specifically Wakemanite:
That it is not legal to marry, and that all marriages are the consequence of worldly lusts.
That she [Rhoda Wakeman] is a messenger sent by God to redeem the whole world from sin, and build up Christ’s kingdom on Earth.
That the devil has the power over death, and whenever his satanic majesty chooses, any sinner must die. She put great emphasis on the passage from Hebrews 2:14 (KJV), “Forasmuch then as children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that hath the power of death, that is the devil” [my italics].
That the curse was put on the world by the evil spirit, but that God will take it off for Christ’s sake.
That she has the power to destroy the world at pleasure, or bring the millennium whenever she wishes to do so.
That God has invested her with supreme power, and that she can exercise this power on Earth.
That she has the power to forgive sins.
That she knows the thoughts of people by looking at their eyes.
That the devil puts the evil spirit upon everybody who does not believe her doctrines.15
One of her most important beliefs comes from II Thessalonians 2:3–10, in the Apostle Paul’s warning to his followers:
3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. [KJV; my italics]
From these passages, Mrs. Wakeman came to believe that the “Man of Sin,” or Antichrist, is an evil spirit that moves from one person to another in order to slay her and, by killing her, damn humanity and destroy the universe. Her husband was revealed as the Antichrist, and his unsuccessful attempt at murdering the prophetess demonstrated Mrs. Wakeman’s immunity to earthly dangers such as a burning stick of wood thrust into the heart. (Had she been Roman Catholic, this incident might have been considered in terms of the “mystical piercing” or transverberation, described by saints like Teresa of Avila, who was stabbed by an angel with a fiery arrow.) Mrs. Wakeman left home to live with a daughter and began her ministry by preaching from door to door.
When the prophetess next visited her husband, she had several devotees with her who tied him up. Mrs. Wakeman then “drew a knife or poniard, and with it made a most unnatural assault upon him, inflicting wounds of a very serious nature. The assault would doubtless then have proved fatal had it not been for the fear of some of her more responsible disciples, who becoming alarmed, put an end to the attack.”16 The wounds reportedly hastened Ira Wakeman’s death at Fairfield on March 8, 1833.
Samuel Sly said that “he was not killed by any of us, he came to his end when he was fifty years of age by the termination of his league with the Devil. I understood from the revelation given to my sister that his league with Satan was that he should live in health and comfort for fifty years, and during that time he was to work the deeds of wickedness.”17 (That means Ira made a pact with the devil at age six.) In addition to trying to kill God’s Messenger, he bewitched all the invalids in the area and she saw “streams of fire fly out of the eyes of her husband and had seen little devils about two feet high dance around him in the room.”18
Wakeman’s death, however, did not put the prophetess beyond the reach of the Man of Sin.
Samuel’s Conversion
Little is known about Samuel Sly’s and Mrs. Wakeman’s activities from 1833 to 1840. On July 3, 1836, however, two of her future disciples, Justus Washington Matthews and Mehitable Sanford were married; also that year, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the “prim and precise” Thankful S. Hersey was teaching children to read at her infant school. In 1842, when Millerism was at its height, she closed the school, “much to the regret of parents in that part of the town,” to prepare for Christ’s return.19 At some point after the Great Disappointment she came into contact with Mrs. Wakeman and became a passionate disciple.
In 1840, Sly was living at Orange in New Haven County with an unnamed female between fifty and sixty years old—presumably Mrs. Wakeman—and a year later they were at Greenfield. There she did “all that lay in her power to promote the good of those around her,” and converted Samuel.20
He sometimes attended Methodist meetings, but one Sunday Mrs. Wakeman offered to explain her views of the Bible and an “unseen power” convinced him to remain. She read passages from Hebrews 2:14 (KJV), which refers to “him that hath the power of death, that is the devil,” the power that had been Ira Wakeman’s but now belonged t
o the second Man of Sin, Eben Gould.
Sly accepted everything Rhoda Wakeman said and stated that the “foundation of our faith” is “that the devil has the power of death, which I had thought before was a power of God . . .”21 (Why Mrs. Wakeman thought Gould was the Antichrist, and even his identity, are unclear. Her daughter, Sarah, was married to an Alden Gould, and the census of 1840 lists an Eben Gould living in Fairfield, Connecticut, who was between fifty and sixty years old; was he Alden’s father?) Samuel embraced the creed with enthusiasm, preaching to anyone who would listen and kneeling to pray anywhere.
When he asked permission to pray at Mrs. Mary Ann Wharton’s house, she agreed but added, “‘pray short, Sammy,’ for he was very tedious—he would pray all day.”22 Sly was considered a “very good, harmless, prayerful man,” though he “acted and spoke like a child” and was always poor. He often worked as a farmhand but would neither slaughter livestock nor step on a beetle, and he seems to have been regarded with the kind of good-humored exasperation reserved for children and harmless eccentrics. (“Once when he called at my house to get a chicken, and wanted me to kill it because he was afraid to do so, but I did not. Some time after, I saw the chicken in his yard and asked him why he had not killed it, and he said he would not do so for all the world.”23)
After Sly’s conversion he stopped walking past the houses of people with the “power,” and upon learning that Mary Ann Wharton was a “great enchanter,” he would run across the street to avoid meeting her. (It might be reading too much into a statement nearly 150 years old, but the situation seemed to amuse Mrs. Wharton.) In addition to enchanters, Sly believed the neighbors were conspiring to kill him and set out across Connecticut to escape them and preach Mrs. Wakeman’s gospel.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 2
